The court decision to render invalid the first round of the Turkey’s presidential contest offers the best chance for the country’s relations with Europe and the US — but brings enormous uncertainty.

The court agreed with secular, liberal modernisers in ruling that parliament acted incorrectly in handling the first ballot for a new President. In doing so, it appears to have triggered early elections.

That may salvage an option that seemed to have vanished: that the next President of Turkey will be a secular politician, and neither an Islamist nor a general.

The past week’s crisis had seemed to offer the country the ugly choice of a politician with Islamist affiliations —albeit presented in the most urbane guise imaginable — or, worse, a return to military rule.

Either of those is still possible. After the court’s decision, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister and head of the Islamist-rooted AK Party, said that he would again present Abdullah Gul, now Foreign Minister, as the party’s presidential candidate. He left open the possibility of new elections if this did not resolve the clash between secularists and Islamists, in which the army has threatened to intervene.

The best result, for those who want a Western-leaning Turkey, would be new elections that led eventually to the choice of a secular president. That may not be on offer, however, and the next-best preference must be for a President Gul over a return of the generals, while hoping that this week’s million-strong demonstrations have impressed on him the cost of trying to bring Islam into national policy.

For all the horror with which the financial markets have greeted the past week’s political turmoil, they should have seen it coming. The Turkish stock market has risen nearly fivefold in five years, reflecting investors’ enthusiasm for a country that they portrayed as the ideal emerging market: large, with a sophisticated urban population; a bridge between Europe and the Middle East, but affiliated to the West.

They weren’t wrong, but they willfully ignored the tension building over exactly that period. The financial crisis of 2001 almost coincided with the attacks of September 11, turning Turkey’s lucrative ambiguity in straddling all these different worlds into a painful contradiction that it was going to have to resolve at some point. It has not always resolved it in the direction of the West. It blocked the US from invading Iraq from the north (although in retrospect, US awareness that Turkey felt taken for granted may have saved the deal). The EU’s chilliness about offering membership exposed many Turks’ ambivalence towards the notion, and Israel’s bombing of Lebanon last year strained that tie.

In general, Turkey’s greatest asset — its role as a bridge between the Islamic world and Europe — became a source of friction and unpredictability in its relations. The markets were reckless in assuming it would always favour the West.

The EU said this week that it thought it bad for Turkey if the military intervened to prevent parliament from electing Mr Gul. That must be right, however hard it is to turn down champions of secularism. Better that Turkey stays democratic than that it jettisons its constitution at the thought of a president with a wife in a headscarf.

All the same, it would be easy for Europe and the US to exaggerate their confidence in Mr Gul’s benign qualities, were he to be elevated to president. He has been ubiquitous on the diplomatic circuit, so they may feel that they know him well. He has been immaculately pro-European; there is nothing for them to hold against him there. He and Mr Erdogan have championed many of the reforms that Turkey would need to make to join the EU. Mr Erdogan and the AK Party, for all their Islamist roots, deserve credit for hauling Turkey out of the 2001 crisis and forcing it to tackle unpleasant economic reforms.

Yet the demonstrators have a fair point — that it is hard to be sure what the AK Party would do, given control of both the presidency and parliament. They are justified in citing its failed attempt to criminalise adultery as a worrying sign; it might be merely one strand of policy, and one that never was put into practice, but it represents a long step away from Brussels.

They are right to fear, too, that these tendencies in the AK Party will be strengthened by the new suspicion of Europe among many Turks. It is hard to imagine that the Army would have dared to threaten to intervene in the choice of president a few years ago, when public passion for EU membership was at its height, for fear of jeopardising it. Now the mood has soured and it needn’t worry.

The EU will simply have to hope that Turkey chooses secularism — and even if it doesn’t, that it rejects military rule — while having lost much influence on the result.

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